NBA Live Making a Return Via Next-Gen Consoles

During a recent call to investors, President of EA Labels Frank Gibeau revealed that a new entry in the NBA Live series was in the works. Furthermore, the return of EA’s flagship basketball franchise is set to arrive on next generation consoles sometime during this fiscal year (April 2013-March 2014). The wording of the announcement indicates that current generation consoles are not included on the return, and that we can expect Live to arrive on the next generation of Xbox.

Electronic Arts has had a rough time these past few years with their basketball games. The Live name was dropped and rebranded for NBA Elite 11, but the title was later cancelled due to poor quality. A demo of the game was released prior to the cancellation, which spurred the viral video featuring the game’s bugs and clunky-ness, topped off with a ‘Jesus Bynum’ stuck in the middle of the court.

EA retooled and plotted a return with NBA Live 2013. Again though, the game was canned for quality reasons. Meanwhile, 2K Sports’ NBA 2K series continued to thrive, even more so without any competition to challenge it.

The next generation iteration of NBA Live features a whole new game engine which will be shown of at this year’s E3 conference. We can expect it to release sometime between the launch of the new wave of consoles and the end of the fiscal year this coming March. The question begs to be asked: can a new engine and a new generation of consoles save NBA Live?